How To Write A Journal Entry

The best writers are active readers. To encourage you to do your assigned reading and to help you read more thoughtfully, you might be asked to write journal entries about reading that you've done.

How Do I Get Started?

A journal entry starts with reading. As you read, mark the text. Underline or highlight the parts that stand out to you as interesting, important, puzzling, confusing, funny, or powerful. Not all readers will mark the same parts when they read, because not all parts have the same importance to every reader. Your gender, your past experiences, your cultural experiences and many other factors will influence what you find important in a text. Also, the kind of text you are marking will affect which passages strike you as important. There is no wrong way to mark a text. Each reader will come up with his or her own system of marking a text. You might use colored highlighters for this purpose.

What Parts Do I Mark?

Readers mark various parts of their texts for various reasons. You might mark the following parts of your text:

• The names of people/characters, places and important events;
• Parts of the article that remind you of personal experiences in your own life;
• Statements in the text that you disagree with or that make you angry or sad;
• Parts of the text that are confusing or problematic;
• Parts of the text that relate to other parts of the text. Perhaps they compare one character to another, one event to another; they relate the text to a movie or different book they have read; or they compare an early reading to a later reading in the course. Comparisons and connections are how we learn everything we know, so try to do this in your journal entries.
• Parts of the text that just stand out! Sometimes parts of the text stand out because they summarize or state the moral or theme of the article; the character learns an important lesson or the name of the title is mentioned; a theme, idea, experience is repeated and that seems important.

There are innumerable reasons to mark a text-- it is up to you, as the reader, to decide what you find important.

What kind of notes should I write as I read?

While you are reading, write down things that go on in your head in "stream of consciousness" style in the margins. You will be making a record of images, associations, feelings, thoughts, judgments, etc. You will probably find that the record will contain:

• Questions that you ask yourself about the characters and events as you read. (Answer these yourself when you can.)
• Memories from your own experiences, provoked by the reading.
• Guesses about how you think a plot might develop, and why.
• Reflections on striking moments and ideas in the book.
• Comparisons between how you behave and how the characters in the novel are behaving.
• Thoughts and feelings about characters and events.
• Comments on how the story is being told. For example, write any words and phrases that make an impression on you, or motifs/themes which you notice the author using.
• Connections to other texts, ideas, and courses.

What is a Journal Entry?

A "journal entry" consists of two parts.

The first part is a direct quotation of the part you marked in the text, copied word for word, and enclosed in quotation marks. Be sure to write the author's last name and the page number of the quotation in parentheses after the quotation. (MLA format requires that you use the last name, a space, and then the number--no "pg.")

The second part of the journal entry is a paragraph of 5 or more sentences that explains why you found the passage to be important or interesting. Sometimes students make predictions about what will happen in the text, they ask questions about the reading, they wonder about the reading, or they explain it or relate to it in some way. Whatever you do, DO NOT SIMPLY SUMMARIZE the contents of the passage. Go beyond it somehow, analyze it, offer thoughts about why it seems important to you. In essence, by writing about the importance of the passage, you will give it meaning--and that is what reading is all about!

It is also helpful to explain what is going on in the story at the time of the passage (the context). Some students like to write (1) what is happening in the story, (2) what the passage says, and (3) why the passage is important or interesting. This structure is not necessary, but sometimes it helps you organize your responses.

The quality of your thinking and the energy with which you attempt to analyze your reading are the most important in this assignment.

Sample Journal Entry
(The Color Purple by Alice Walker)

"[Y]ou use to remind me of a bird. Way back when you first come to live with me. [T]he least little thing happen, you looked almost about to fly away. You saw that, I say. I saw it, he say, just too big a fool to let myself care" (Walker 261).

Albert asks Celie what kind of animal she likes. When she tells him that she likes birds, he surprises her and me by telling Celie that she used to remind her of a bird. He actually paid attention to Celie when she came to live with him, and saw that she looked like a bird about to fly away. Albert was truly a fool not to care - he saw that she was scared and unhappy, but instead of trying to help her he continued to make her life hell.
It's easy to see why, of all animals, Celie would like birds. In her life she's wanted to fly away from many things. If she were a bird she could have flown away from her Pa, escaping the horrible things he put her through. She could have flown away from Albert and his awful children. She could have flown after Nettie when she left, and kept watch over her always. She would have flown free, safe and unburdened.
This passage reminds me of a passage from The Bean Trees. In The Bean Trees Mattie tells Taylor that when they first met Taylor seemed like a "bewildered parent" (Kingsolver 177). Taylor was "embarrassed to think of how Mattie must have seen straight through [her] act" (Kingsolver 177). Both characters tried to hide their true feelings of fear. Neither of them realized how transparent they were until someone told them they saw their fears all along. I would expect Mattie to realize Taylor's fears, but I never would have expected Albert to see through Celie.

Research Journal

"Children tend to accept the family standards, whatever they are, as normal, and they often go on to practice them ..." (LaViolette 26).

I strongly believe in this statement. Children spend most of their time with their parents. Therefore, a parent is not only a child's greatest influence, but they are looked up to as role models. Children's actions reflect the actions that they see (the humorous "monkey see, monkey do" theory holds true for children). If a male child is brought up in a home where his father abuses his mother, he learns that this is an acceptable way to treat women. A man's greatest risk factor for becoming abusive in adulthood is "exposure to violence in [his] childhood home" (Lenore Walker 6). The same holds true for young girls. If she witnesses her father beating her mother, she may believe that it is okay for men to abuse and control women. Observing abusive behavior is, according to Walker, one of the greatest risk factors for a woman to become later involved in an abusive relationship. In Alice Walker's The Color Purple the main character, Celie, is abused sexually and mentally as a child. After she marries, her husband abuses her sexually, mentally, and physically.